10 Graphic Design Rules you ought to Never Break
It’s encouraged. Breaking the principles is taken into account to be edgy, unique, and forward-thinking.
With the career field of graphic design becoming more accessible in recent years, everyone wants a bit of the pie.
Unfortunately, most newcomers to the planning profession are unaware of certain graphic design rules — especially those they ought to NEVER break.
By not following these rules, the top result are often a visually jarring design, forcing your audience to lose trust in your ability or competence.
By having poor graphics, potential customers can view your brand as undeserving their patronage.
That means you won’t get paid.
To assist you in creating more successful designs, I’ve created an inventory of the ten most ordinarily broken graphic design rules…
Let’s dive in.
Graphic Design Rules — #1 — Design With Consistency
Consistency is Graphic Design Rule Numero Uno!
One of the foremost important graphic design rules is consistency
graphic design rules
You have to take care of consistency across all design elements and branded materials so your audience clearly recognizes that the brochure or flyer in their hand is an extension of an equivalent brand they see on your website.
By being according to your design and branding on your marketing materials, you're ensuring your brand isn't mistaken for an additional or represented poorly to your audience .
Be according to the following:
Color palette — use no quite 5 colors (including shades) in your branding (2-3 is perhaps best)
Typography/web fonts — don’t use quite 3 fonts, or stick with one font family
Use similar elements throughout, but confirm that not little bit of marketing material looks precisely the same — a touch variability within the parameters you’ve set is OK.
Basically, you would like all of your branded materials to seem like they belong to a series without being the precise same piece of selling material during a different medium (so your brochure doesn’t appear as if you took your website and printed it out).
Graphic Design Rules — #2 — Avoid Poor Legibility
Legibility is of utmost importance when choosing fonts, and this is applicable to both web and print design. If it isn’t legible, then you won’t be ready to convey your intended message, but more importantly, you would possibly drive your audience away…
And lose them forever.
It’s also important to think about what fonts would appeal most to your audience while still aligning together with your brand.
If your target market was predominantly made from men and ladies over 55, then it'd be an honest idea to choose a sans-serif font with a bigger pixel size to extend visibility — this will improve user experience and keep customers happy.
Nobody wants to be annoyed by text that’s hard to read.
Legibility also can be improved by adding an overlay of contrasting color to your chosen web font.
In the above example, a subtle overlay of black was added to the photograph to extend contrast, therefore improving legibility when contrasted against the white webfont, Oleo Script.
White against black (and vice versa) will always have the very best contrast, which generally equates to raised legibility.
Graphic Design Rules — #3 — Avoid Color Discord
Color may be a powerful tool — but it are often used for evil!
Make sure that you simply choose colors that complement one another — avoid creating color discord.
See how the red letters against the green background almost vibrate?
The red shapes are fighting for the viewer’s attention, which may be visually jarring and difficult to read.
That doesn’t mean you can’t use a complementary scheme, just like the yellow and purple above. The light-on-dark scheme helps to alleviate vibration or color discord.
Graphic Design Rules — #4 — Prevent Non-Proportional Scaling of Graphics and Text
Whenever you scale graphics, make certain you maintain an equivalent proportions while scaling.
To put it simply, don’t stretch your images folks — it's terrible, it's unprofessional, and you’ll basically get judged for it immediately.
Size matters… if your image doesn’t fit properly the primary time you are trying to upload it to your website, use it on a social media ad, or slap it on a brochure, edit it! Small images don't scale well — you'll got to hire a printmaker to repair these issues for you before preceding.
The image on the left seems like crap — stretched horizontally, the snowflake doesn’t maintain an equivalent proportions when scaled down.
On the proper , the image looks fine — bad design always draws the attention and always distracts the reader from your message and your brand.
Don’t make the error of distracting a customer from what you would like them to shop for — get your images right.
Graphic Design Rules — #5 — stand back From Raster-Based Images
Oftentimes, newcomers to graphic design will use raster-based images in their design. Whenever they enlarge or reduce the dimensions of a raster-based graphic, they finish up with pixelation.
You can avoid this error by using larger images with higher resolutions; it keeps them crisp, even after you scale them.
Regarding icons or symbols, it’s best practice to use vector graphics, which may be scaled with no loss in quality. Adobe Illustrator may be a vector-based application, so any icons created in Illustrator won't become pixelated when resizing.
Usually, raster-based graphics find yourself in designs because newbies use Adobe Photoshop to make their posters and flyer illustrations — that’s a rookie mistake there champ, and one you would like to avoid just like the plague.
Graphic Design Rules — #6 — Maintain Alignment
Randomly placing graphic elements or text within a design can make your print or web design look unorganized and messy.
Messy designs look unprofessional and reflect poorly upon your business, and honestly, it takes little or no work to align objects properly.
Make sure you employ guides and align objects in reference to each other on the canvas/artboard, but follow an easy rule of thumb — pick a line somewhere on your page and check out to align your graphics and text with it, whether horizontally or vertically, instead of randomly placing text and graphics across a page.
Even an easy left alignment for each element on your page can look generations better than boxes of text strewn about the page — it makes us dizzy, it hurts our hearts, and it drives your customers away.
Columns help too, and you would possibly find that you simply can come up with a more complex alignment arrangement after a touch thought — but put the thought in first, or you’ll find yourself with a brochure that only distracts your audience with its bizarre text arrangement.
Graphic Design Rules — #7 — Seriously, Only Choose 3 Fonts
I really want to stress this one because I see it so flagrantly violated so often — regardless of what you’re designing, limit yourself to no quite 3 different fonts.
Using too many fonts is ugly fam — it’s one among those graphic design rules that ought to be etched in stone (and in some people’s foreheads).
Make sure that your fonts are appropriate for your industry in fact , and for your audience, but this is often not a case where more = better.
For example, the purchasers of a contemporary , well-established architecture firm are getting to expect a particular look (please ignore the grammar mistake on this image — we’re not talkin’ GSP here folks).
A sans-serif font family, like Muli (in the right-hand image) suggests innovative, high-quality work — traits that are important to implant within the mind of the audience that’s getting to be ready to afford the work that this type of company can provide.
Graphic Design Rules — #8 — Establish a visible Hierarchy
You have to determine some sort of visual hierarchy throughout your design. Basically, a visible hierarchy is that the use of size and color to stress one item over another and draw the viewer’s eye to a particular item above others.
This is especially important on pages with many various items of text. In most blog posts (like this one) you'll see size getting used to determine a hierarchy. check out the heading at the highest of this text — it’s huge!
The second level headings are large, and therefore the paragraph text is little — but the buttons are fairly large and stand out.
That’s a visible hierarchy — weighting different elements by importance and using color and size to either draw the attention or let the attention wander because it pleases.
Without clear visual hierarchy to guide the viewer’s eye through the piece, they're going to be unable to work out the order during which the knowledge must be read.
In the example on the proper, the visual hierarchy is nearly backwards — we would like to start out out out reading at rock bottom albeit it makes more sense to start with the heading and albeit the natural thanks to reading this in English goes to be to start at the highest.
The huge letters at rock bottom literally force the attention of a reader of English to start out at the top — crazy, right?
On the proper , it’s clear that we start with the heading, read the body text, then click to maneuver on.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Graphic Design Rules — #9 — Watch Your Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation
I took a touch dig at GSP earlier, but the reality is, you'll really hurt your relationship with a possible client if your marketing materials are riddled with GSP errors.
A few typos every now then are not any big deal, but a bunch of huge mistakes can kill a relationships before it even begins.
Always take touch overtime at the top of every project to proofread for grammar, spelling, and punctuation (GSP) mistakes.
Don’t be afraid to invite help! Everyone makes mistakes and it can never hurt to possess a extra set of eyes. If you can’t find someone to proofread your stuff, think about using software to assist you, like Hemingway or Grammarly.
Graphic Design Rules — #10 — Embrace Whitespace
Oftentimes, people's new designs want to cram as many graphics onto one poster or booklet as they possibly can.
Calm down Jack — no one’s gonna die from a touch extra whitespace on the page.
This is one among those graphic design rules which will make or break your design. Please, for the love of all that’s good within the world, conserve your whitespace!
Whitespace is that the negative space in whatever you’re designing, the a part of your page that has nothing in it — no graphic elements, no colors, no icons, no text, nada, zip, zilch. Having ample amounts of whitespace within your design can add a greater sense of professionalism and class .
It also allows the viewer a flash of rest — you don’t want to cram such a lot information onto one flyer that the viewer becomes disoriented.
Get the Free Style Guide Template and Apply These Graphic Design Rules
Now that you simply understand the fundamentals of graphic design, the principles are yours to interrupt — but don’t get cocky just yet…
First, you would like to place those rules into action for your brand.
Go ahead and grab the free Style Guide Template. it'll lead you thru the method of mapping out how your brand should be applied on any and every one marketing materials. you'll apply these graphic design rules directly and make sure that anyone who’s getting to assist you together with your design, branding, or marketing goes to represent your brand the way you would like them to.
